There are always individual preferences and differences. There will be some learners who thrive solo, and I’m all about cheering on when a student finds their recipe or repertoire for feel-good learning. 

Between the 73 tabs we might have open to the hypervigilant “what am I forgetting?” feeling, it can feel so hard to stick to the task–any task–these days.

Students are sometimes surprised when I mention food and water as part of learning strategy coaching sessions, but I’ve had too many 1:1s with students who describe sleeplessness yet have a Red Bull in hand, who speak about relentless underlying worry and who live off of coffee and candy. I’m not claiming causation, but I do notice correlation. 

What touches me most in these student sessions is the articulated confusion over what to do. In that, I hear open-heartedness, I hear (as always) a place for learning strategies to help, and I hear the friction and tension and push-and-pull that learners live in all the time. The “what should I be doing?” or “how can I decide?” The sense that amidst all of the demands, it’s very hard to know what to do. 

Given that procrastination makes things worse in the long-run, why do learners (and all of us) procrastinate? Because we’re bored with the task and want to do something more interesting and fun; because we get distracted by and pulled into more immediately compelling activities; because the discomfort we feel in the face of the work we know we need to do is hard to sit with.